Jon Simons

My Indiana University webpage is at:

http://www.indiana.edu/~cmcl/faculty/simons.shtml

I am currently (in 2011) Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. I also have taught at the University of Nottingham (1995-2006), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and The Seminary of Judaic Studies, Jerusalem (1993-95). After earning a BA in Politics and Modern History at Manchester University (1979-82), I focused my graduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1986-92) in political theory, where I wrote my thesis about Michel Foucault.

One of my main research interests is poststructuralist and feminist political theory. I have published Foucault and the Political (Routledge, 1995) and a chapter in Susan Hekman (ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Foucault (1996). In the second half of the 1990s I also published essays on those topics in scholarly journals including Philosophy and Social Criticism, Social Epistemology, Society and Space, Political Studies, Strategies, Cultural Values, Critical Horizons, Journal of Political Ideology, Theory & Event, and Political Theory, as well as chapters in Iain MacKenzie and Shane O'Neill (eds.) Reconstituting Social Criticism (1999), and Fabricio Forastelli and Ximena Triquell (eds.) Las Marcas del Género: Configuraciones de la Diferencia en la Cultura (1999). I am also the co-editor (with Simon Tormey) of Manchester University Press's political theory series, Reappraising the Political.

From 1995-2005 I directed the MA in Critical Theory (and from 2001 also in Cultural Studies). Building on my expertise across the field of critical theory, I have edited three volumes of chapters about critical theorists, From Kant to Lévi-Strauss (2002), Contemporary Critical Theorists (2004), and From Agamben to Žižek (2010), all with Edinburgh University Press.

Another focus of my research is on the interface between, media, social and cultural theory, with a particular interest in popular, mediated, democratic politics and images. Since 1999 I have published a variety of essays which concern the complex relationships between media and democratic politics, popular culture and politics, politics and aesthetics, governmentality and technology, and the constitution of political subjectivities. These essays appeared in the journals Intertexts and Journal for Cultural Research, as well as chapters in John Corner and Dick Pels (eds.) Media and the Restyling of Politics (2003), Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen (eds.) On Radical Democracy: Politics Between Abundance and Lack (2005), and Lincoln Dahlberg and Sean Phelan (eds.) Discourse Theory and Critical Media Politics (2011). Taken together, these essays argue that in order for a radical democratic aestheticized politics to become both conceptually possible and potentially actual, media, politics and aesthetics need to be conceptualized on the same plane. Against an antipathy to mediated, aesthetized politics I argue that the problem is not that politics is aestheticized and mediatized, but the ways in which it has been so. The accumulative project draws on Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau, Régis Debray and others to claim that critical theory should understand its place within mediated, popular culture - a point which also explains my trajectory as a scholar. In 2009, I edited a special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique on "Democratic Aesthetics."

A particular focus of my work on the blending of mediated culture and democratic politics are images and visual culture. Building on a graduate seminar I developed about image critique, I have co-edited with Sunil Manghani and Arthur Piper Images: A Reader (2006), an anthology of historical, philosophical and contemporary theoretical texts about the study of images of all sorts. I also edited a special issue of the journal Culture, Theory and Critique on "Images and Text" (2003) and published chapters about image and visual politics in John Hall, Blake Stimson and Lisa Tamiris Becker (eds.) Visual Worlds (2005), and James Elkins (ed.) Visual Literacy (Routledge: New York, 2007).

In the summer of 2009 I began a study of images of peace used and advocated by the Israeli peace movement. The project will analyse critically the conceptions of peace that are advocated by the peace movements and assess the productivity of those images in promoting peace. I treat images as abstract, complex condensations of an assemblage of cultural and historical associations, manifested through visual and other media and public discourses. The research project entails an interdisciplinary approach to the notion of political imagery, drawing from scholarship in the fields of media studies, visual studies, political marketing, political theory and art history. Records of the activities of various peace organisations will be researched as rhetorical performances and enactments of style that present and embody images of peace. Points of interconnection with the broader cultural historical context will be examined through studying pertinent examples of Israeli literature, visual culture, journalism and historical scholarship. The initial results of my research will be published as a chapter in Stephen Gibson and Simon Mollan (eds.) Repertoires of Violence (2012).